Failing schools

Off with their heads

How to improve school performance

ALL the prattle about school choice, beloved of New Labour and Tories alike, is meaningless to a child who ends up with no choice but to attend a failing school. And although failing schools are less numerous than they once were, there are still a lot of them around: 1,557, according to the National Audit Office (NAO), educating nearly a million children. In a report published on January 11th, the government's spending watchdog looks at what causes schools to fail their pupils, how much is spent on turning poor schools around and how effective those efforts are proving to be. Could do better, they conclude.

The government spends around £1 billion a year on a plethora of programmes aimed at stopping schools from sliding into failure and fixing those that do. By far the most expensive is the programme to set up academies in poor inner-city neighbourhoods. The cost is about £27m per school, most of it for fancy new buildings. Fresh Start, under which a school is closed, tarted up and reopened on the same site with new staff and a new name, spends around £2.2m per school. Excellence in Cities gives money to schools in poor areas, and a bad report from school inspectors brings money, too.

In the short run, all this spending does seem to improve exam results. But the value for money is more questionable. Even before the extra funds that come from these programmes, schools that perform poorly offer some of the most expensive education in the state system. They are often half-empty, as students leave if they can find places elsewhere. Although some funding will go with them, not all does, so an unpopular school will end up with more money per student than a popular one. And the targeted spending that comes with failure is sometimes good money thrown after bad. Two-fifths of the schools that came out of “special measures” (the worst grade a school can get from the inspectors) between April 1995 and March 1997 had closed by July 2005.

A recent paper from Policy Exchange, a think-tank whose views command the attention of the new Tory education team and even of some in government, takes a different approach. The authors criticise the current system for rewarding failure and focusing on cost, rather than value. All educational funding should be doled out per head, so that schools have a strong incentive to attract extra students and aren't cushioned from their own mistakes as student numbers fall. And extra spending should go to students who have been failed, rather than schools that are failing.

Students at schools that have been found wanting should be awarded an “advantage premium”—extra money that they could take to any school they choose to attend, even a private one. The funding could be found by scrapping the current government schemes, which throw money at those schools that have shown they cannot be trusted to spend it wisely.

Alan Smithers, an educational expert at the University of Buckingham, agrees that targeting spending on schools, rather than students, is the wrong thing to do. Over time, schools that have money lavished on them will attract more able students, exam results will get better and they will appear to have “turned around” even if there has been no genuine improvement in the quality of education. A recent analysis of city academies supports this view: their exam results are better than those of the schools they replaced, but they also have fewer children on free school meals (the standard measure of student deprivation).

The one thing everyone seems to agree on is that a good head teacher is vital. The NAO found that in two-thirds of the schools criticised by inspectors and later given a clean bill of health, the head had been replaced in the meantime. (They also point out that a good deal of the money spent turning around a failing school goes on severance pay for sub-standard senior staff.) Policy Exchange recommends that heads of failed schools be summarily dismissed and new management brought in, with incentives for success and fines for failure. Mr Smithers agrees, but sounds a note of caution. A school head is like a football manager, he says: a good one can make a difference, but a poor club will never get the results that money can buy the richest ones.

Chris Woodhead, who headed the schools inspectorate between 1994 and 2000 and now chairs Cognita, a private education company, says the debate about how to remedy school failure should have been over long ago. “We don't need report after report on the theory of turning around failing schools,” he says. “It isn't a matter of money; it's leadership first and foremost.” Perhaps what's needed is decapitation on a vast scale. But recruiting a stellar new head teacher is not that easy. A quarter of all headships in state schools are currently vacant—and there is a retirement bulge on the way.